The Future of Us (4 page)

“Thirty-one,” Josh says. “So this is supposed to be fifteen years from now.”

I point to the next sentence.

Josh turns to me. “I can’t believe she’s writing these things.”

“Not
she
,” I say. “
Me
.”

“Why would anyone say this stuff about themselves on the Internet? It’s crazy!”

“Exactly,” I say. “I’m going to be mentally ill in fifteen years, and
that’s
why my husband doesn’t want to be around me.”

Josh leans back in the chair and crosses his arms against his chest. When he does that, he looks like his brother. I haven’t seen David since last year, but he was always a fun person to have in the neighborhood. Guys wanted him to be their older brother, and girls had a crush on him.

“Listen, Emma. I think . . .” Josh says, but then he pauses.

“Just say it.”

Josh points toward the screen. “We don’t know for sure who Emma Nelson Jones is or what we’re looking at. But even if it’s real, you’re still reading a lot between the lines.”

The front door closes. Josh and I jump back from the computer.

“Emma?” my mom calls. “Marty says he locked the door when we left, but—”

“It’s okay,” I shout. “Josh is here, that’s all.”

“Are you ready to help us get email addresses?” she asks.

“Can we have another minute? Josh is helping me find something . . . an assignment.”

“That’s fine,” my mom says. I hear her footsteps climbing the stairs. “But you need to finish up soon. It’s a school night.”

She cannot see this.
I reach over and click the
X
on the top right corner of the screen. The cheerful voice chimes, “
Goodbye!
”

My mom walks by, waving as she continues on to her bedroom.

Josh picks up the Scooby-Doo keychain. He stops in the doorway and looks back at me.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I don’t think you should look at this thing alone,” he says. “It’s either a mean prank or it’s . . .”

I feel the tears coming on again.

“Let’s make a deal to only look at it together,” he says.

“So you’ll come over again?” I ask. “You don’t mind?”

Josh stares at the keychain in his hand, pressing the Scooby nose on and off. “No, it’s cool.”

“How about tomorrow? After track.”

“That’s fine,” Josh says. “Maybe Tyson and I will even stop by the meet.”

I smile for the first time all evening. Last year, Josh used to come to all my home meets just to wave and cheer me on. It makes me want to be honest and tell him what else I saw on the website, before he came over. But I can’t bring myself to say it. I look down at my new white carpet. What I saw would make things even more awkward between us. And for one night, I want to feel like things can be normal again.

“What is it?” Josh asks.

I’ll have to tell him eventually. “Tomorrow,” I say, “we should see if you have one of those webpages, too.”

AS I SQUEEZE OUT a line of toothpaste, I hear Emma’s car door shut and the engine start. When I woke up this morning, I considered hitching a ride so we could have a chance to talk, but it’s better if I still keep some distance. Rejection always hurts, but having it come from my best friend was the worst.

Emma shuts off her car engine. I look out the window. She’s heading back into her house. Her bedroom window is across from my upstairs bathroom, so I can see her pull her saxophone case from the closet. When I was younger, I used to write notes with markers and hold them to this window for Emma to read with her pink binoculars. I still keep that can of markers on my desk, but I’m sure she sold her binoculars at one of the yard sales the Nelsons are always having.

I rinse and spit, listening to Emma start her engine again. Seconds later, it stops. This time, she slams the car door. I feel bad for Emma, but I can’t help laughing. She’s convinced that what we saw on the computer is her life in fifteen years. As much as I’d like to believe something like that is possible, one of us needs to remain skeptical.

I turn off the faucet and look outside. Now Emma’s trunk is open and she’s tossing her silver sneakers on top of her saxophone case. She slams the trunk, but it pops back open as soon as she walks away.

I KNOCK ON the passenger window of Emma’s car. “Can I get a ride?”

She reaches across and unlocks the door. I lower my head to climb in, something I didn’t have to do when Emma first got her license. I position my skateboard between my knees and click the seatbelt into the buckle.

Emma puts the car in reverse. “Thanks for coming down.”

“Rough night?”

Emma nods. “I’m not in the mood to face certain people today.”

I wonder if she means Graham. His locker is near mine, so I get to see him pull Emma into a groping session every morning.

It always fills me with so much joy.

“Want to swing by Sunshine Donuts?” I ask.

Emma turns on her blinker. “Absolutely.”

A mile past Wagner Park, Emma pulls up to the orange speaker-box and orders herself coffee with cream and sugar and a cinnamon donut. I ask for a glazed donut and chocolate milk.

“I don’t get it,” Emma says as she pulls forward. We’re still two cars back from the pickup window. “How did this happen to me?”

“Not that I’m buying into the future stuff,” I say, “but I have no idea why anyone would even
joke
about your future sucking. You’re really smart and—”

“Thanks for bringing that up,” Emma says. “But I wasn’t talking about my future sucking. I was talking about the whole website in general. How is it possible to read about something that hasn’t happened yet?”

The car in front of us pulls up to the window. I reach into my back pocket and offer Emma a few crumpled dollar bills, but she pushes my money away.

“At first I thought it was the CD-ROM,” she says, “but maybe it’s the phone jack that made something happen during the download. Remember that electrician who rewired the house?”

“You think he accidently wired you into the future?” I say, trying not to laugh. “Anyway, that was months ago.”

“But I didn’t have a computer yet. Maybe we should move the computer to your house to see if the website works there.”

No way. We can’t start running back and forth between our houses again.

“But that still wouldn’t explain
how
it happened,” Emma says. “Or how we can read about things that occur fifteen years from now.”

I point out the window at the cars driving by. “If you want me to play along, here’s a theory. You know how Vice President Gore calls the Internet the ‘Information Superhighway’? Let’s say everyone’s going the same direction on this superhighway. Time travel would be about finding a way to jump to a different spot.”

The car ahead of us pulls away. Emma drives up to the window and then passes her money to the Sunshine woman. “So you think this website jumps us ahead somehow?”

The woman hands our drinks to Emma, who passes them to me. I place her Styrofoam cup of coffee in the drink holder so she can grab the donut bag.

“Honestly, I’m just playing along,” I say. “I still think it’s all a prank.”

We don’t say much for the drive to school. When we pull into the student parking lot, I check my watch. The bell is set to ring in three minutes.

“I know I dragged you into this,” she says, turning in her seat to face me, “but I’m a little hurt that you’re not taking it more seriously. If you saw
your
future and it looked terrible, I don’t think you’d be so quick to blow this off.”

“But it’s not real,” I say. I crumple up the donut bag and stuff it into my empty cup. “How about after your track meet, let’s try to figure it out? Maybe whoever made it misspelled your name somewhere or got a date wrong. We’ll find something.”

“Why do you need to prove it’s a prank so badly?” Emma asks.

“So
you
can stop worrying. Your life is going to turn out fine.”

Emma looks into the rearview mirror, and then turns to me. “Josh, before you came back over last night, I found something else on that website.”

The way she’s staring at me gives me the chills.

“If someone’s pulling a prank on me,” she adds, “then they’re also pulling a prank on you.”

“ME?” Josh’s eyes squint in confusion.

His webpage was one of the many things that kept me awake last night. I should have told him about it the instant he came up to my room.

“Emma.” Josh waves a hand in front of my eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“Last night,” I say, “before you came over, I was looking at the Facebook website. Remember where it says I have three hundred and twenty friends.” I pause and exhale slowly. “It showed you as one of them.”

There’s silence in the car.

“It said ‘Josh Templeton,’” I add, “along with a picture of you. An older you.”

Josh taps the Sunshine Donuts cup against his knee. He didn’t want to believe any of this. He wanted to prove it was a prank.

“You have short hair like David,” I say. “And you wear glasses.”

“My eyes are fine,” Josh says.

“Not in the future, apparently.”

Josh presses his thumbnail into the Styrofoam cup, making half-moon marks up one side. “Did you see anything else? When you clicked on Emma Nelson Jones’s picture, it took you to another webpage. Could you do that with mine?”

I nod. “It has your birthday as April fifth, and it says you went to the University of Washington.”

“Like David,” Josh says.

“And now you live back here again.”

“In Lake Forest?”

I wonder how he feels about that. Personally, I’m determined to move away someday. There’s no actual forest in town and Crown Lake is nine miles down the highway, surrounded by expensive houses. The downtown is only three streets long, and you can’t do anything without everyone knowing about it. But Josh is more laid back than I am. He seems to think Lake Forest is perfectly fine.

“Where’s my house?” Josh asks. “They don’t have me living with my parents when I’m in my thirties, do they?”

I shake my head. “I think you’re out by the lake. There was a picture of you in your yard, and you could see a dock in the background with a motorboat hitched to it.”

“Very cool,” Josh says. “So they made me rich.”

I roll my eyes. “Why do you keep saying ‘they’? Who are you talking about?”

“The people who created this joke of a website. I’m going to go to the tech lab today and see if anyone’s been scanning pictures of—”

“When you say ‘the people who created this,’ don’t you get it? At some point in the future,
we
created it. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it looks like interconnected websites where people show their photos and write about everything going on in their lives, like whether they found a parking spot or what they ate for breakfast.”

“But why?” Josh asks.

The first bell rings for homeroom. Graham’s going to wonder where I was this morning. We usually meet at his locker and walk to band together.

I grab my bag and then reach for the door.

“Hang on,” Josh says as he spins a wheel on his skateboard. “That Facebook thing, did it say whether or not I’m married?”

I flip through my keys so I can unlock the trunk. “Yeah, you’re married.”

“What does it say about . . . her?” Josh asks, his face pale. “My . . . you know . . .
wife
?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in this,” I say.

“But I still want to know. It’s
my
future, right?”

“Here’s the thing,” I say, taking in a breath. “In the future, you’re married to Sydney Mills.”

Josh’s mouth hangs open.

I open my car door. “We’re going to be late.”

I IMAGINE Sydney Mills standing in front of me. Her long brown hair is held back by a white headband, and her eyes are the color of sweet caramel. She opens her arms and I pull her into a kiss, the fullness of her breasts pressing into my chest.

Then I open my eyes, grab my skateboard, and meet Emma at the trunk.

“Sydney Mills?” I say. “That’s ridiculous!”

Emma stuffs her silver running shoes into her backpack. “But now you want this to be true, right?”

“Why would I want to believe something that’s a hoax?” I say. Even so, I’m tempted to make Emma drive us home so I can see for myself. But if we’re late to school, the secretary will leave a message on our home answering machines.

Sydney Mills is a year ahead of me. She’s insanely hot, she’s one of the best athletes in school, and she comes from a wealthy family. I have no idea why anyone would match us up even as a joke. We’ve been in Peer Issues together since January and we’ve never said a word to each other.